Hi. I'm an architecture student and I've been using inkscape pretty intensively this past year. It has probably become the software I more extensively use in my ACTUAL work(unlike Blender or The Gimp which, paradoxically, I've been using for much longer).

Anyhoo, so far my only complaint with inkscape has been its stability(or lack thereof: I've come to reacquire the healthy habit of saving every 5 minutes), and its reaction time(even when it doesn't crash, it still freezes a lot, and has to be left alone for a while). At first, I just assumed that Inkscape's slowness(bear in mind that I tend to work with particularly large files) was due to its relatively young age. Then, as I started using the XML window more and more, and to actually glimpse what's going on backstage, I started wondering if maybe SVG is to blame. I'm not a programmer(at least, not a real one), but I guess manipulating text files has to be less efficient than manipulating a more abstracted, binary representation of data. Am I totally wrong with this? Am I right?
Just now I was importing some pdf files into inkscape, and I noticed a couple of things: First, the resulting svg files are way heavier. Way way heavier. Second, I was editing this diagram consisting of roughly 12,000 small segments(yeah, a lot), and at first I had merged all segments into one object but this caused some of them to disappear. So, I edited the file, that as of that point weighed around 600kb, and made each segment into a separate object. That change alone caused it to go from those 600kb to 7mb. I guess 12,000 tags add a lot of baggage.
I know I might be stretching the limits of what Inkscape was designed for, and I excuse myself if I'm talking nonsense here. I just want to know:
A) Am I right? Is SVG making Inkscape slower than it could be?
B) Has this issue been discussed previously?(I tried to seach but didn't know what to seach for(terms))
C) Are there plans to make Inkscape NOT dependant on SVG? I know that being an SVG editor is one of Inkscape's main goals, but I cannot help to wonder.

Thanks.

I am a programmer, and though I've never looked at the Inkscape codebase I'm pretty sure Inkscape's internal representation won't be a text file. A representation that can be read and written *as* a text file, sure, but that isn't much of a constraint.

I think your PDF import into Inkscape doesn't really show anything. It's the import process that's to "blame", because it's not able to produce an efficient representation of the PDF. I general (I imagine), if you produced an identical image within Inkscape and some other tool that represents that image as PDF, then there wouldn't be an enormous (well, within one magnitude) disparity in file sizes.

P.S. The next version of Inkscape will have autosaves. The develop version has that now, which I use mostly for that feature.

... also, you can assist the developers by reporting crashes. Read how here - http://www.inkscape.org/report_bugs.php?lang=en

I think your issue with the pdf file objects depend on the way the pdf was made. I often edit outside pdf files that are structured in a weird way, ie. not the way I would draw it using Inkscape (for example 1 separate object for the stroke and one for the fill instead of using one).

Maybe you can make use of clones for your small segments (if there are similarities between them), that would reduce the file size significantly.
Or instead of combining them in a single object (where z-order can be lost) just group them, that is just one more tag in the file.

I'm not a developer but I don't think the data format you mentioned affects the performance. The format doesn't matter, you always have to parse the data (interpret it), and the interpretation is the key with vector objects as they are more like mathematical formulas, and not simply pixel by pixel data as in bitmap images.

I think when you're editing so many objects it's bound to be slow in any editor, you can only help yourself with buying more memory and a faster processor. Inkscape code is being restructured for the 0.47 version so the speed might improve (hopefully Inkscape will later be restructured to use computer farms and GPU) but there is a limit of some sorts when it comes to vector objects.

When I was creating an object with over 50000 nodes it took 20 minutes to do it. Inkscape used up all my processor power during that time, but it didn't crash or freeze. How do you recognize the freeze anyway? Maybe you just didn't give Inkscape enough time to process what it needs to process. Freeze is when the application isn't usable anymore, you can only kill it, but operations that can't be processed instantly don't fall under that.

You should have a system monitor cpu and memory indicator visible while working in Inkscape, this has helped me a lot to know when to leave Inkscape alone to do its work (or buy more memory for large files).

dSmoke wrote:C) Are there plans to make Inkscape NOT dependant on SVG? I know that being an SVG editor is one of Inkscape's main goals, but I cannot help to wonder.

There are no such plans